Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

alignment is for chiropractors

1. re punching up/punching down, there was a Slugger O'Toole post last week calling out* "mischaracterisation and 'punching down' of Ulster Protestants", which v much confused me until I noticed the article refers to caricatures in Punch magazine of old

* apologies if "calling out" is a phrase that annoys the shit out of you, I'm not that keen myself but always seem to end up using it because I can't think of a similar suitably vague alternative

2. as a hypochondriac of nebulous imaginary woes which are undiagnosable as actual illness but I could still do with "healing", I can live with its use in new age treehugging contexts, but for art... I don't like it

I like art to rip me a few new wounds and ruptures I s'pose (NB not really but it sounded cool to my inner teenager), and don't you tell me whether your art is effective in any positive or negative sense

Punching up is to brighten a script. If it's a comedy, add in more jokes! If it's a drama, heighten the tension!

Punching down is a dance move at hardcore shows.

I like to say of an overworked script "this could have used a little punching down"

xp u get a pass on most things spacecadet <3

<3 <3 tho I might need a list of the thing I don't get a pass on, for research purposes

or even things plural

perhaps there is only one but that's not a great list

O don't worry you'll know when it happens

imho the punching up/down metaphor has proved legitimately useful and valuable for, e.g., female comedians pointing out to male comedians that rape jokes aren't funny. is it the most precise and on-the-money way of making this point, idk, but ime it's not really about finding an "excuse" to do anything.

u get a pass on most things spacecadet

I got this joke

?!

The idea that jokes "work" up the power structure, but not down the power structure, is a good one imo. You don't have to call it punching up/punching down but it is still a good principle.

That said, this view is yoked to a specific theory of comedy, i.e., funny = unexpected inversion/subversion of the received social order. The king on the throne is banal; the village drunkard on the throne is amusing because it upends the normal hierarchy.

The main competing aesthetic of comedy is quasi-Freudian, i.e., funny = what you were thinking anyway but were too polite to say out loud. This view embraces down-punching "jokes" like haha Mexicans are dirty or haha women can't drive well. But it doesn't accommodate surprise, absurdity, or relief, all of which feel to me like important components of "funny."

i've said it before but bergson nailed it 100 years ago
http://www.authorama.com/laughter-1.html

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation between ideas: “an intellectual contrast,” “a palpable absurdity,” etc.,--definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

it's really worthwhile to read the whole thing but the basic idea is that laughter is a social corrective that identifies a rigidity or inelasticity in the mind or body of a human being - it calls out the mechanical in the body of the living

I think that's a viewpoint that insists on structure in a fluid human field where structure can only be implied and applied from a relative perspective and is therefore, in the very essence, incorrect if it attempts to be a universal rule.

I mean you can do it, of course. It's just....why? As soon as you do it you're milking the plaudits from the people who agree with you. Well and good but you're predefining humour as a tool of whatever policy in itself, which is valid but hugely limited as a wider definition of the art.

It seems a masturbatory exercise of the highest order to in any way (even the lightest) insist that there be political or etc elements to how humour should/must/does succeed outside of 'lol thats funny'

tldr you are flogging a dead cart

xp

putting the gift before the horse

It is a bit weird that "comedy is only funny if it's punching up" has become kind of an accepted rule of humor when it's really a reflection of cultural change. Probably 90% of jokes throughout history--the ones not about kings and lords--were punching down. Certainly nearly every joke I heard in school would be considered punching down, except those about teachers (who likely made less $ than our parents.)

Not sure when it's considered punching up, down or sideways. Is it just social position or more about a specific situation? If Prince William tells a funny joke at the expense of a deserving stereotypical loony lefty, is that punching down?

I've got a fear that I'll involuntarily laugh at a crying person or a disabled person making odd faces and movements, or someone with a bizarre voice. Is that just nervous laughter?

A rule that doesn't identify what makes people
laugh but rather what people should/shouldn't consider funny is not a theory of comedy but one of social control.

If Prince William tells a funny joke at the expense of a deserving stereotypical loony lefty

I..

uh...

o_O

RAG on fire today.

I struggled for examples but I just meant an extremely privileged person making fun of a George Galloway type, who probably aren't that rich and powerful in general.

Everyone makes fun of George Galloway, he gets punched from all directions.

I guess it's about "social control" as much as advocating for any ethical platform is. The basic point is that if you are in a powerful in-group and you make your money exhorting that group to laugh at the suffering of a less powerful out-group, you are not some transgressive rule-breaking rebel, but a participant in the normal functioning of everyday oppression, and a bully besides. Framing it as ''rape jokes aren't funny'' isn't a first step towards writing a binding codex of comedy, it's a way to get that point to land in the mind of the comic in question, or to get it down succinctly enough that it's something a heckler can use to deflate the whole bullying sham.

I really recommend Lindy West's /Shrill/ on this point, as she really writes this from within the world of stand-up and conveys the stakes very well (and often humorously, natch).

The point I'm probably by now labouring is that you are still insisting on a framework

"____ jokes aren't funny" depends on whether the joke is funny, not on ______

"exhorting that group to laugh at" again seems to me to be a very deliberate framing.

You're a comedian, you write funny jokes as best you can.

I'm sure we've done this to death on the "tyranny of humour" thread tbf

won't someone think of all the hilarious rape jokes that might never get a chance to make bros chortle if people succeeded in persuading other people not to tell them. what a dystopic nightmare.

Sarcasm of course is famously....

dr casino it's interesting how someone making a self-evident point - that you're making a social/ethical intervention, not a humor intervention - compels you to try and shame that person again not along the lines of humor/comedy but along the lines of whether it is worth sacrificing X for the sake of the greater good. you were almost even honest too. just admit - "yes, this is not about comedy, it's about political correctness. and there's nothing wrong with that" and go on yr way. bc all the other stuff is just disingenuously clouding the issue.

I bumped the relevant thread, if it helps.

there is surely no sound sweeter to the human ear than 'political correctness'

"it's about being sensitive to the needs of marginalized groups" if that sounds sweeter

A rule that doesn't identify what makes people
laugh but rather what people should/shouldn't consider funny is not a theory of comedy but one of social control.

― Mordy, Thursday, July 6, 2017 9:30 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I first encountered the 'punch up/punch down' concept within a milieu where people come to Chicago from say the deep south to study comedy and would need to be told pretty explicitly why they could expect to lose an audience and/or their fellow performers if they wandered down certain roads. Not so much a theory of comedy as a performative guideline.

Fair enough, that!

the problem is that those jokes worked in the south but no one moving to the south is getting a primer like "hey down here ppl love if you punch down at these groups" bc the entire punch up/punch down framework is designed w/ a moral judgement in it (bc who doesn't think it's more ethical to punch up - afflict the comfortable - than punch down?) but it's masquerading as neutral performative advice.

I myself directly described it as an ethical issue and a matter of persuading people along those lines? And ime so do the people I've read on this matter, they do NOT frame it as neutral performative advice at all.

If anything disingenuously clouds the issue it's your refusal to engage with questions like this without seeing them in terms of "political correctness" and "control,'' and those only on the part of the critics. As if asserting the A-OKness of the punching-down jokes is not a political claim; as if the bully comics' screeds about ''political correctness'' are not an attempt by them to retain control.

You could just as easily ''go on your way'' and ''be honest'' by just saying ''the women and POC who brought in this language of punching-down to try and make the content and social scene of comedy less toxic and hostile to them are wrong and should all shut up.'' If that's not the position you want to defend, feel free to clarify as I have no idea how else to take your apparently very heartfelt concern on behalf of the comedians who will be shackled by this ''social control.''. (Which is sorta funny cause this whole thread is about asserting that certain language should be purged from contemporary conversation - I think we all accept that there is some valid push and pull around what we would like to hear people say, socially! God forbid it should be motivated by an ethical impulse and not just us getting IA around corporate blogospeak or whatever else.)

Like...I mean this language comes from a specific context and historical moment, which is why I found the West really helpful to fleshing out what's going on within comedy and why this would be important to people (as I am not a comedian). To me articulating that context is not ''other stuff'' but essential to understanding what ''punching down'' means and is about in 2017.

Google results for:
conservatives aren't funny punching down
About 9,530,000 results (0.46 seconds)

the problem is that jokes aren't funny or not funny based on what direction they're punching. that's a misnomer meant to obscure that they can be funny or not based on the political leanings of the crowd hearing the joke. you can punch down all you want if you're punching down at the right group (like at neckbeard pepe memesters living in their parent's basement), and you can't punch up if it's at the expense of the wrong group. the honesty comes when you say "i find jokes funny when they don't upset my natural political sense of who are the victims and who are the violators in society" but framing it as a some kind of platonic rule is dishonest bc it's not true. esp since it clearly depends on the political commitments of the audience. you're confusing issues because we can talk about whether it's a rule for comedy (here are jokes you can tell in chicago vs. jokes you can tell in birmingham) or we can talk about whether ppl should censor themselves for the greater good (i.e. no matter how it plays anywhere) but they're two distinct conversations. one is pragmatic and the other is ideological. i'm ok with you making either case - i don't really care - but i'm not okay with making both cases at once and pretending they're the same case.

Did someone do that? I don't know if anyone did that.

ftr I'm ok with whatever its just joeks and ilx conversations

Yeah it doesn't seem like you guys are even disagreeing!

yes that's what happened upthread. i said that it's about who it's okay and not okay to punch and ppl argued that it's just about what is funny.

maybe i misinterpreted idk

I can't remember that but this threads been awful busy

idk Mordy, the problem, for me, is that finding those distinctions really interesting, and important to parse out, just seems irrelevant and weird in the actual reality we're living in, where the only comedians demanding freedom from this "social control" and requests that they "censor" themselves are the asshole bro comics telling rape jokes. i mean that's the actual real context in which the word, usage, and phrase that annoys the shit out of you comes from. so why die on this hill, what's so ethically important to you about making sure the lines are really clear between making a universal description of all comedy and an ethical claim about what kind of jokes people should tell?

anyway, it's like, look: nobody who says "rape jokes aren't funny, punching down isn't funny" means "no audience laughs at rape jokes, no audience laughs at jokes that punch down" - obviously tons of audiences do! comedians make a lot of money telling rape jokes! the people asserting "they aren't funny" are asserting this after having lived through being surrounded by people laughing at them. they know they are "funny" in the sense of jokes that fly in birmingham.

it seems like you're imagining them po-facedly setting it forth as laugh-getting advice - "young comic, let me tell you a trick of the trade - never tell a rape joke, they never get a laugh with any crowd, you'll be dying of flopsweat on stage!" - when ime that is never how this claim has been delivered at all. "punching down is not funny" is a shorthand for a lot of things, yes, a theory of humor that does include a set of ethical claims. if i read you right, you find that shorthanding to be offensive, or you're bothered by it being sort of sloppy rhetorically, but for me it feels like, sure, sloppy rhetoric is annoying, but if attacking it puts you on the side of the rape comedians, again, what is really motivating you to be there going to bat against the sloppiness?

slogans and mottos always compact a lot of claims together. that this one has spread and found an audience and helped people express an inchoate feeling they had about comedy is, imho to be celebrated, because it is about reclaiming comedy as a space for all kinds of groups and people. i for one cannot stand going to stand-up nights for precisely the reasons West articulates, you basically are going to get at least one creep bro dude telling nasty punching-down type jokes at some point in the program, and it's alienating and it's uncomfortable and the world is less funny for all the great comic voices that have been pushed out by this. imho.

(one thing that is funny: loss of capitalization when i switch from posting on phone back to desktop. sigh.)

i don't think it's just "asshole bro comics" who have concerns about political correctness and comedy. again if someone's argument is "rape victims have suffered enough for their sake let's just not make jokes about rape" i think it's a very sensitive + empathetic argument (tho one that maybe is wrongly applied in comedy where transgressions + taboo busting are necessitated). it's an honest argument for sure. but the punching up / punching down rhetoric is not just limited to one particular case. it's a way of forcing an entire political context onto a field that should be primarily concerned w/ what makes ppl laugh, not what people + groups are okay or not okay to offend, or who really holds power in society (something that every good foulcauldian knows is a fluid + messy dialectic - not some equation that can be proven on a blackboard). what it leads to is a place where it's "okay" to "punch" cishet white men and pretty much no one else - which btw has had political consequences as well as now cishet white men are pretty sure they're a legitimate identity group w/ self-interests and idk i can't imagine how that could possibly go wrong.

again there is nothing remotely transgressive about a dude joking about rape. it is like a pledge of allegiance to established power structures. cis het white men are already pretty sure they're a legitimate identity group with self-interests (#MAGA), that is why they/we get so fucking defensive about this.

and again your claim of what this "entire field" "should be primarily concerned with" is also a political and ethical claim. i think you recognize this but you're not always writing as if you do. imho we are both advancing political and ethical claims and i think contesting those is sort of a valid thing to use language for. so this word/usage/phrase does not annoy the shit out of me.

comedy should be about making ppl laugh is some kind of claim but i'm not sure what kind of "political and ethical claim" it is. if i say that woodworking should primarily be about making quality wood products is that also a political and ethical claim? and if you live in a society where it's looked down upon to make rape jokes, then it sure is transgressive about making a joke about it. it sure as hell is transgressive telling racist or sexist jokes in particular crowds. it might not be funny or a good idea, but if there's a culture of taboo around it then it's transgressive.

Prince William making fun of 4Chan trolls. Punching up or down?

Ilx making fun of Bannon through jokes about his appearance in a body shaming way. That specific route is punching more down I think, because it probably hurts people in general more than it hurts him. And yes, I laughed at the body shaming jokes, shame on me.

Ilx making fun of Michael Flatley's appearance in a way it reflects his supposed douchiness. punching up or down?

I approve of Prince William making fun of 4Chan trolls as long as he doesn't make fun of perceived physical inadequacy or social inadequacy itself. It must be social inadequacy via douchiness.

if i say that woodworking should primarily be about making quality wood products is that also a political and ethical claim?

It is if you're defending people building guillotines on the basis that their craftsmanship is good.

if i say that woodworking should primarily be about making quality wood products is that also a political and ethical claim?

yes! of course it is! e.g. one could say, alternatively, that "woodworking should primarily be a means by which the woodworker can make a decent living" or "woodworking should primarily be a ritual of giving and receiving the gifts of nature" or "woodworking should primarily be a means of getting the greatest number of useful wood goods to the greatest number of people." or any number of other things. some of which might align, some of which might conflict. people throughout history have argued over this - ruskin, for example, would not agree with the home depot company over what woodworking should primarily be about.

anyway you didn't just say "comedy should be about making people laugh," you said it should be primarily concerned with making people laugh, which indicates that other priorities might be in play, and opens a space where one can assert "these other priorities should be given more weight, such that at times the combination of these other factors might override the concern with making people laugh." basically i think it's actually a really forceful, and not at all self-evident claim to declare what a whole field is "primarily concerned with" or "really about" or whatever.